Peaceworks #11 Directory

Zaire: Predicament and Prospects

Part I

Understanding the Unending Crisis in Zaire

Jean-Claude Willame

"Zaire: is there a state?" . . . "the unending crisis" . . . "the rise and fall of the Zairian state" . . . "the nonexistent state." For more than five years such phrases have been used to describe Zaire, as though the country were unable to avoid congenital chaos during its first decades of independence.

Some twenty years after independence, Zairian sociologist Ilunga Kabongo wrote that were one to put all the relevant data on Zaire in a computer, one could conclude such a country did not exist. ¹ But clearly Zaire does exist, to the astonishment of many observers, even though certain meaningful social, economic, and political structures have imploded over the past five years; and even though--probably a more worrisome point--few ethical and moral values have prevailed in political and civil society.

This report does not attempt to recount the long and painful historical processes that led to that implosion. Instead, it tries to explain the way society at large, as well as some of its economic, social, and political arrangements, hold together in a somewhat bizarre and mostly paradoxical "order" preventing the explosion that one would have expected.

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